severally trace their civilizations.  But the lines of development of these two civilizations, of the Orient and the Occident, have been separate and divergent since thousands of years before the Christian era; certainly since that hoary eld in which the Akkadian predecessors of the Chaldean Semites held sway in Mesopotamia.  An effort to mix together, out of hand, the peoples representing the culminating points of two such lines of divergent cultural development would be fraught with peril; and this, I repeat, because the two are different, not because either is inferior to the other.  Wise statesmen, looking to the future, will for the present endeavor to keep the two nations from mass contact and intermingling, precisely because they wish to keep each in relations of permanent good will and friendship with the other.

Exactly what was done in the particular crisis to which I refer is shown in the following letter which, after our policy had been successfully put into execution, I sent to the then Speaker of the California lower house of the Legislature: 

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, February 8, 1909.

HON P. A. STANTON, Speaker of the Assembly, Sacramento, California: 

I trust there will be no misunderstanding of the Federal Government’s attitude.  We are jealously endeavoring to guard the interests of California and of the entire West in accordance with the desires of our Western people.  By friendly agreement with Japan, we are now carrying out a policy which, while meeting the interests and desires of the Pacific slope, is yet compatible, not merely with mutual self-respect, but with mutual esteem and admiration between the Americans and Japanese.  The Japanese Government is loyally and in good faith doing its part to carry out this policy, precisely as the American Government is doing.  The policy aims at mutuality of obligation and behavior.  In accordance with it the purpose is that the Japanese shall come here exactly as Americans go to Japan, which is in effect that travelers, students, persons engaged in international business, men who sojourn for pleasure or study, and the like, shall have the freest access from one country to the other, and shall be sure of the best treatment, but that there shall be no settlement in mass by the people of either country in the other.  During the last six months under this policy more Japanese have left the country than have come in, and the total number in the United States has diminished by over two thousand.  These figures are absolutely accurate and cannot be impeached.  In other words, if the present policy is consistently followed and works as well in the future as it is now working, all difficulties and causes of friction will disappear, while at the same time each nation will retain its self-respect and the good will of the other.  But such a bill as this school bill accomplishes literally nothing whatever in the line of the object aimed at, and gives just and grave cause